Our investment in Bumpers

Tl;dr — Check out Bumpers on iOS. Naturally, the best way to announce our investment in Bumpers is by recording one, so we did just that with Ian last week:

We’ve been quietly working with the team at Bumpers for a little while now, so we’re thrilled that we can finally talk about our investment and share the product. Bumpers is a product for creating spoken audio content. It handles the entire workflow — record, edit, publish, host, embed, etc. and helps you do this quickly and easily. This is not meant to replace your high-end equipment and post-production tools for long-form content. Bumpers is perfect for impromptu solo ramblings, it’s lovely for recording conversations with friends — on the street, in a restaurant or bar, in the back of a cab, and works great for more formal recordings as well.

Bumpers was created by Ian Ownbey and Jacob Thornton, two of the best product builders we’ve ever had the good fortune to work with. We’d been talking a lot about podcasting around the time that we first met Ian a year ago, primarily about the means of production — recording audio, editing, hosting and how specialized and relatively inaccessible the process was. Audio creation was (and remains) daunting for most people. Much of the content and audience seems clustered around expensively produced long-form content, in the style of “This American Life” where you hear it and think, “this is great, but I could never create it, this medium is not for me.” So we felt like we were already on the same page when we met Ian and he described his vision for a complete mobile workflow for more casual spoken word audio. So we’re really excited to support Ian and Jacob in their mission and can’t wait to see where they go from here…

You can read more about Bumpers in Ian’s launch post, but the best way to understand Bumpers is to use it! Get it from the app store, record something, and share it. Tweet your Bumper at one of us or @bumpersfm, they embed beautifully in tweets and are really fun to make.